Geological Fluid Dynamics: Sub-surface Flow and Reactions

This book is the long-awaited successor to Owen Phillips’s classic textbook, Flow and Reactions in Permeable Rocks, published in 1991. In the intervening 18 years between the two, significant advances have been made to our understanding of subterranean flow, especially through the vast amount of research into underground storage of nuclear waste and aquifer pollution. This new book integrates and extends these modern ideas and techniques and applies them to the physics and chemistry of sub-surface flows in water-saturated, sandy and rocky media. It describes essential scientific concepts and tools for hydrologists and public health ecologists concerned with present day flow and transport, and also for geologists who interpret present day patterns of mineralization in terms of fluid flow in the distant past. The book is ideal for graduate students and professionals in hydrology, water resources, and aqueous geochemistry.

Owen M. Phillips is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He has held academic posts at the University of Cambridge and The Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society for his contributions to oceanography, and a fellowship in the American Geophysical Union for his contributions to geological fluid dynamics. His Last Chance Energy Book, published in 1979, anticipated the first global energy crisis of the 1980s, while his recent research has been on subsurface aquifer flows, the dispersal of contaminants and flow-controlled reactions in rocks. He has two other publications with Cambridge University Press – The Dynamics of the Upper Ocean (1966), which was awarded the Adams Prize from the University of Cambridge, and Flow and Reactions in Permeable Rocks (1991).